A Nightmare on Echo Street - PCB Guitar Mania's Echo Dream Clone

So this particular build has to rank up there with the absolute weirdest pedals I've ever put together and played, and it can be a real wolf in sheep's clothing depending on how you set the controls! Based on the Death by Audio Echo Dream 2, PCB Guitar Mania's Echo Nightmare PCB (available in trough-hole or SMD formats) is a pretty faithful adaptation of the original based on my playtesting so far. You're able to get a huge variety of tones and delay times with the pedal, and add fuzz. You can even kill the dry signal and only hear repeats if that's your jam (though I'm still struggling to understand an application for that functionality in anything outside extremely experimental music!). 

PCB Mania No Noise Gate - Dang Useful Utility Pedal!!!

Readers of this blog should be well aware at this point that I'm a fan of high gain distortion and fuzz pedals. I'm also a fan of vintage transistors actually used in those high gain pedals. While you can get some absolutely amazing tones using high-gain distortion effects, you can also get a lot of tones you don't actually want. The most common is a hiss (high or low pitched) or a hum, though there are other unwanted noises that can detract from your sound. Given the prevalence of the issue, it should be unsurprising that there is a solution out there - Noise Gates. Many companies have produced a variety of pedals that essentially act as a high-pass filter - louder tones, i.e. what you actually want to hear, sail through while the softer hiss tones are filtered out. In this entry, I build PCB Mania's No Noise Gate - which is based on the Electroharmonix Noise Gate. The current EHX Silencer pedal is a bit more capable as it includes an effects loop rather than simply acting as a filter.

Invoking the Spirit of EVH - the Wolfgang 5051

Despite passing away a little over a year ago, Eddie Van Halen remains one of the most influential rock guitarists of all time. I was a huge Van Halen fan in my youth, and one of my first concerts was their 5150 tour (the first with Sammy Hagar as lead singer). As is common with many prominent musicians, Eddie worked with various companies to develop his own lines of gear including guitars and amplifiers. Starting in 1993, Eddie worked with Peavey to develop the 5150 series which was produced until 2004. He then moved to working with Fender on the EVH line of amplifiers which were first released in 2007. This particular build creates essentially a preamp effect based on the Peavey circuit which can be used either as a pedal directly or in an effects loop - though with the sheer output it seems far better suited to the latter!

Death by Reverb - Creating Fun Echo Effects!

Many guitar amplifiers include a built-in reverb setting. Since the 1960s it is one of the most common effects added to electric guitar. These days most reverb is added digitally, but there are some true analog versions out there including Anasounds' spring reverb system (which looks and sounds exceedingly cool!). Most amplifier effects are essentially one knob which adds progressively more reverb creating essentially a larger echo chamber for the sound, but there are other ways to manipulate reverberation digitally to create the illusion of playing in anything from a cave to a large room or even hyperspace if you want to get fairly crazy. Death by Audio's Reverberation Machine is billed as a "synthetic atmosphere creator." Guitar PCB Mania has a version of this circuit called the Death by Reverb which relies on a Belton reverb module for part of the build. It appears to be an "inspired by" rather than an absolute copy, but the controls are fairly similar.

Updating the Electric Mistress - No Send / Receive Loop Mod

Last week I posted an entry detailing my EHX Electric Mistress build based on the PCB Guitar Mania Electric Lover PCB. Overall I was pretty happy with the build, but I had noticed something a little unusual when I began the calibration process. In my first entry I mentioned having to crank the bias trimmer quite a bit to get a good tone (or any tone at all for that matter). On the PCB Guitar Mania Facebook group, another user posted that he was having a similar issue with his build, although his was apparently bad enough to where he couldn't get a reasonable calibration. Fortunately the long-time board users had a fix for him, and since I'd had a similar issue in my base-build, I decided to take a deep breath, pull the PCB out of the enclosure and try the fix on mine as well. 

The Electro-Harmonix Electric Mistress Flanger / Chorus

I'll be completely honest, I'm not a great guitar player at this point. I'm somewhere in the "intermediate" range, but I'm having a huge amount of fun learning not only guitar technique but chasing great sounds. One of the songs I've always loved is Rush's "Natural Science," and the flange effects at the beginning of it really do a lot to set the tone and mood of the piece. While no one seems to have a definitive answer (apart from Alex Lifeson, who apparently hasn't discussed / disclosed what hardware was used), the consensus is that he used an EHX Electric Mistress on the album Permanent Waves - especially on "The Spirit of Radio" (another song I need to learn...). As I'm on a massive pedal-building kick, and given one of my other guitar heroes David Gilmour also used one, I decided to build my own EHX Electric Mistress using PCB Guitar Mania's Electric Lover Flanger PCB. 

Long Live the King (of Tone)!

Here's a recent project that I had a minor initial issue with, but is quickly turning in to one of my favorite pedals. This is The Knight of Tone from PCB Guitar Mania. The board is based on the King of Tone, another boutique pedal that is extremely popular. As with most out of production boutique pedals (edit - turns out it is still in production, but with a 3 year waiting list - yikes!), this one is now fairly expensive - in the $700 to $800 range for originals. Rather than sourcing my own parts, I ended up picking up the full kit from Das Musikding. You can get it with or without an enclosure, and the enclosure can be drilled or not. I went ahead and picked up a drilled enclosure and the whole thing cost me €55 - or about $65 at today's exchange rate. Not a bad savings!